


For the Greater Good

by Rhinozilla



Category: Jak and Daxter
Genre: Gen, Sandover Village
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 23:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17477051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: As they start to assemble the Precursor Ring outside his hut, Samos remembers the future that they are approaching, and the fate that Sandover Village will face once they leave.





	For the Greater Good

Samos knew. This was it. As soon as Keira started assembling the pieces of wood and metal behind their hut, and the villagers had curiously helped him and Jak maneuver the massive curved pieces of Precursor metal into the shape of a ring…he knew that their days in Sandover were truly dwindling.

“I think it’s a…sled.” Keira had been thinking aloud for the past hour.

The floor of her work shop had been carpeted with the partially dismantled Rift Rider that…she herself had built so long ago…and that she would build again in just a few years’ time…

The image of his daughter, older and harder than the child that she was in this moment, standing among the grey of Haven, came unbidden to him, and Samos grimaced. The teenaged girl that he’d met in Haven a lifetime ago had had to survive in that dying city completely on her own.

“Or…no, because see there’s a…what?” Keira huffed, moving around to the back of the Rider. “It looks like a mix of Precursor technology and…something else…I’ve never seen wiring done this way…Whoever built this was either a genius or crazy.”

Samos couldn’t stop a chuckle at that, stroking his beard as he turned to look out at the ramp attached to the side of the hut, where Jak and the Sculptor were arguing over how to assemble the Rift Gate.

“They’re all circles, man!” The Sculptor waved his arms over his head. “That’s not where that piece goes!”

Jak groaned and rolled his eyes, bending over and shoving at the heavy arching metal piece.

“No! Dude, just let me!” The Sculptor tried to muscle Jak out of the way.

Jak let the metal piece fall with a loud thud. He did a half bow and made an impressively passive aggressive gesture for the Sculptor to go ahead and do it his way. The Sculptor looked like some of the wind had gone out of his sails at hearing how audibly heavy the metal was, but he puffed up his chest and gave it a go anyway…and could barely budge the thing.

Jak stood back with his arms folded and his eyebrows up until the Sculptor gave a sigh of surrender. He then offered a reconciliatory smile, and Jak returned the grin, moving to help again. Always ready to forgive and move on to get the job done.

Samos could see the young man, reloading a gun half as big as his entire body, emptying clip after clip into the incessant hoard that rushed them at the old Haven Stadium. Abandoning the gun and transforming in a roar of purple lightning and claws to tear into the enemy.

Daxter shuffled into view, lugging the sealed, bulbous shape of the Precursor time map. Samos couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the loud, grating tone of his voice could carry for miles.

Daxter was…exactly how Samos remembered the obnoxious boy on Jak’s shoulder in Haven.

“Oh my…what is it?” The old bird woman had curiously stepped into Keira’s workshop, marveling at the semi-assembled Rift Rider.

“Just more Precursor crap!” Daxter made to chuck the time map into the ocean.

The weight of the thing made his throw look pathetic, and Jak easily caught it before it tumbled far. The Mayor had tottered over as well, tapping his fingertips together as he tried to study the strange technology that they were handling.

Keira straightened up, standing in the middle of the Rider and turning in slow circles to get full view of it. She looked to the old woman.

“We found it in the same place where we recovered that ancient Precursor ring out there…At least, it will eventually be a ring once SOMEBODY stops MESSING around!”

Over on the ramp, Jak, Daxter, and the Sculptor all looked at her, thoroughly called out.

The woman chuckled. “Where do you think this new ring gate will lead? It’s so… so large. Oh, do be careful, dear. It all looks awfully…strange.”

Samos didn’t speculate with the others as they started throwing out guesses about the destination on the other side of the gate. Their theories quickly grew wild, and Samos distanced himself from the conversation, stepping away from the hut and to the edge of the small island that his home was positioned on.

The rickety foot bridges connected the little islands that led to the main land. Blue lights sparkled off the center of the turning windmill over the Mayor’s house. The old woman’s Flut Flut bird cooed at the Sculptor’s muse, where it preened itself on its owner’s porch. Over the tree tops, he could just barely see the floating discs and globes that hovered over the Precursor ruins in the jungle.

The ocean kissed the sand at the edges of their islands, leaving frothy white lines in its wake. The water, so painfully blue, darkening the sun bleached sand. The splashes of vibrant green trees that blanketed the landscape. The rich browns of the cliff faces and rock formations. Everything here was so saturated in life, absolutely busting at the seams with colors that hurt the eyes if you stared too long. Samos remembered the headaches that he had suffered for weeks after first coming to this sparkling place…far from the washed out Haven in all its shades of grey and beige.

Laughter danced across the breeze as the Mayor, having lost some bet or other regarding the Precursor metal, foisted a power cell over to Jak and Daxter, who commenced one of their victory dances as they received their prize.

Samos cast his eyes over to the smiling villagers, at the innocent curiosity that kept them circling the commotion at his hut.

Soon they would all be dead.

He grimaced and started up the steps to the main level of his hut, eying the volumes that lined his shelves and the idle swirling of energy inside the smaller warp gate by his window.

He tried to remember if his older self…when HE had been the younger one all those years ago…if he had said anything about this place. No, surely there had been nothing to say.

War was waiting for him and Jak upon their return to Haven City. Blood and pain and horror waited for them there. For over a decade, he had been training that child to return to a future that would damn near break him. A decade ago, it had been inconceivable to him that the small, gentle, happy child that he had brought with him to Sandover would become the angry, vengeful, cold young man that Haven so desperately needed.

Samos tried to force the image away, but immediately cursed his cowardice and instead tried to ease the image with the greater truth…the memory of that same caustic man reassuring the little boy and giving advice about a wumpbee nest that Samos knew for a fact that the boy had NOT followed.

It seemed that every Jak found that nest on his ninth birthday, and every Daxter was always right by his side when things went sideways. Every Keira built the Rift Rider to take them through the gate. Every Samos would keep what he knew to himself and would let that Rift Rider carry them away from this peaceful place, abandoning it to the metalheads.

These people were not fighters, not in any sense of the word. Why would they need to be? Threats to them had only ever been the dry season, the wet season, even Misty Island…which was too far away to truly worry them.

Only Samos and Jak were strong enough to put up any true fight…even they would fall under the onslaught of the metalheads that would eventually invade this place. They might come from deep within Misty Island…or emerge from the dark eco silos around their world…but they would come. Somewhere…and soon…they would invade. The other Sages would fight too…and they too would fall. Haven would rise, with its walls and its regimes, and the metalhead forces would swell.

To save a future of thousands, this village of less than dozen had to be sacrificed.

“It’s a rider!” Keira suddenly called out. “Daxter, bring that weird orb over here. I think it might fit into this console! I think whoever designed this meant to use it to travel through that big gate!”

Yes, Samos thought to himself, always only to himself, the day was coming soon.


End file.
